Winyl 3.0.3

A free and surprisingly powerful music player with a well-designed interface

By Mike Williams | Sep 22, 2014

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You probably have more than enough music players already, but if none of them quite do it for you then you might want to spend a little time trying Winyl - it's really very good.

After a short download and speedy installation (no adware concerns here and the entire program took under 10MB on our hard drive), Winyl will ask for the location of your music folders. Point it to the right place, it'll import your current tracks and albums, and in a few seconds you'll be ready to go: a simple tree interface allows you to view your collection by artists, albums, years, genres, folders and more. Pick something, double-click and it'll start playing.

The main interface is so compact that you might wonder what else you can do, but look more closely. There are tiny bars at the bottom of window which represent your place in the current track, and the player's volume - just click to change. And if you right-click the bar at the top or bottom of the screen you'll find a menu with many more options.

The program can create or import playlists, for instance (M3U/ M3U8, PLS, ASX, XSPF). There's an equalizer, with a pile of presets. An even more compact mini-player. Loads of configuration options. And if for some reason you don't like the interface, there are a few skins you can choose to reconfigure it - you can even make the program look more like iTunes, or Windows Media Player.

And yet, despite all this, Winyl remains tiny and undemanding. Even after an age of running in the background on our test PC, as we tweaked every setting and explored every dialog, it still consumed barely more than 21MB RAM: this isn't a program which is going to get in your way.

What's new in v3.0.3?

- Updated lyrics providers.
- Updated radio stations.
- Fixed bugs.

Verdict

Winyl is an excellent all-round audio player - it looks great, and performs well